Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold

This is cool. Something about dropping everything to go see a movie in an empty theater is sort of tempting.

Love this concept. - If it could give me a near to showtime notifications to help me decide if it's a true empty screenings. That would be great. - If it connect with my Google Calendar for schedule, it would be amazing.

To me this suggests that theater’s are at least partially incorrectly pricing things which explains why they are struggling.

When I lived in Germany, I had an apartment in the vicinity of three tiny arthouse theaters. I used to go there all the time by myself because you could basically walk to all three of them. Saw a lot of movies I would have never seen otherwise, most of which I don't remember at all.

The theaters were never full. So it was basically just like watching a movie in your own living room. Yeah, except maybe for the handful of strangers that were there to watch with you.

I remember I went to a small showing once as a kid. It was just our group and 1 lady in the theater.

We got to small talk and the lady mentioned she had once been the only customer for a showing and told the projectionist that she didn’t want to be a bother and could come back and another day.

The projectionist had apparently replied that it was no bother - they would roll the movie even if no one showed up!

Do enough people buy tickets in advance now that this really indicates anything of value? I'm old and have never pre-purchased a movie ticket in my life. I assume a lot of people do, but the few times I've been to the movies lately, it seems people are buying tickets at the theater.

I have an alternative in this for Alamo Drafthouse. It sends me alerts as soon as new movies are listed, typically before promoted or announced online.

It’s meant I can jump on re-runs etc I really care about (just saw Fight Club last week) - and get the specific seat location I prefer.

(If you want alerts just contact me with your email and location - info in bio)

May be I am in minority but I would hate to be alone in entire theater. I enjoy some vibe and people around

I remember walking in late to a movie with my wife and noticing that there was nobody there except us. We bought the tickets on site, so the show must have started before we went in, despite no tickets having been sold.

I used to frequent the brisbane regent cinema precisely because it was reliably empty. The franchise kept it running because having a really nice prestige theatre was good for their brand, but compared to their other sites it was revenue neutral at best.

I have been quite a heavy patron of AMC theaters these past few years since COVID ended. I have seen A LOT of movies play to empty theaters. I used to actually peek at many of the rooms when I left my movie and so many were downright empty.

Its the norm and its probably why their stock is trading at $1.45 as of this writing.

Its a dead (not dying, dead) entertainment option. When you are competing for the same 24 hrs in a day with TV, Youtube, Gaming, Streaming, TikTok, Instagram and many others the theater is bottom of the barrel for young people today.

And don't tell me its because people are disrespectful or the commercials are too long. These are a problem but Alamo Drafthouse tried to tackle this and they ended up in bankruptcy. AMC would also be bankrupt today but it's saving grace was the meme stock frenzy they had a few years back. Probably bought them a few more years but that ride might be coming to an end.

Currently they fill the rooms for the pop movies like old established franchises but that only comes along every couple weeks at the most and the rest of the time the place is not really busy. This is a bit different in the big cities but AMC has overextended themselves with too many locations in the rural and suburban US.

...Also this app is not displaying accurate data (I assume they are pulling from AMC's API). My local theater is listing no results and I cross checked and there are movies currently listed that have 0 seats booked so the app is counting incorrectly for at least one theater.

EDIT: After I wrote this, the site auto updated with new data. Now I see some screenings but it is still inaccurate because it is still missing movies from that theater...maybe they are scraping instead of using the API? This is a simple problem if using the API (I wrote my own home cooked app): just iterate through all theater ids, find the ones with 0 bookings and display that list.

This site will probably defeat its purpose. You discover an empty showing and are excited to have your own "private theater", but thanks to this site, somebody else will have the same idea and you'll both have to share your private theater.

I’ve been to a few showings by myself back in the moviepass days. It was really nice, I’d wait until a movie was basically at the very end of its run and watch whatever was playing. I can’t stand others making noise, too distracting.

On flip side had switch gyms to be among strangers becomes turning on gym socialization really tanked my training.

There is always that one person who eats popcorn so loud for most of the movie and ruins the experience for me.

i watched 2 movies all alone. one of the best experiences i have ever had since i hate being around people

Damn, people really love going to the movies here in Austin, Texas.

Where does it get the realtime data for this?

Movie theaters are reinventing themselves in various ways, and I’m unsure if it’s working, but some of it is creative.

Around here, films from Bollywood show in Telugu, Hindi, Gujarati languages. There are family films in Spanish (those aren’t bad dubs, but parallel scripts and A-list voice actors.) Want to watch a Studio Ghibli film? Here’s the timetable for dubbed; here’s a timetable for subtitles!

There are live video-game tournaments. There are premieres for live operas and symphony orchestra performances that are simulcast around a region.

There are Christian groups who go in to support a film, and they can turn those into fundraisers and evangelization activity.

The auditoriums can be rented out for special events. Big birthday, Kindergarten graduation, Quinceañeras, etc. They will support teleconferencing and businesses can hold seminars or all-hands meetings there.

I suppose that all of these schemes were harmed by the pandemic and lockdowns, but the advertising is still there, and the Hindus are still showing up on public transit.

Would be a wonderful site for people to find places to have private movie sex, but then I remembered that this is HackerNews